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How Businesses are Benefiting From Social

One of the biggest topics to emerge from the Microsoft conference circuit this year is the concept of “working like a network” — encouraging companies to rethink how they operate, collaborate and communicate by using enterprise social technologies to eliminate departmental silos. This allows companies to better adapt and respond to ever-shifting market conditions as well as improve knowledge sharing.

To get a good understanding of what that vision looks like, watch Yammer’s Moments video. It shows how people within a responsive organization used Yammer to collaborate and create a product that made a difference for its customers. The video ends in a new product design job for an administrative coordinator, happy customers who fulfilled their goals, and a warm feeling about the power of enterprise social. This isn’t just marketing hype either: McKinsey & Company recently conducted a survey of leading enterprise companies on the use of social networks, and nearly 90 percent reported a measurable business benefit gained from implementing social platforms.

Now let’s define the possible benefits you can realize through enterprise social:

Save time, money and effort on change management processes

Generate new products with higher likelihood of success upon launch

Reduce operational, customer service and training costs

Identify new leaders in the company and retain talent to stimulate future growth

Examples of how social can create these benefits for businesses can be seen within the worlds of change management and customer service.

Using Social to Improve Change Management Processes and Customer Service

Enterprise social has revolutionized the way businesses approach change management. Change management principles aim to establish a structured approach that ensures changes are successfully implemented. This traditionally requires an assessment of the situation, followed by observation, analysis — garnering employee and customer feedback — piloting and implementation.

Enterprise social has accelerated the traditional timeline for change management efforts. In today’s world, there is a limitless amount of information, feedback and criticism being presented through public social networks to companies — meaning that companies must become far more agile and responsive to feedback than ever before. The good news for businesses is that leveraging social capabilities is not only the cause of these problems, but can also serve as a solution.

Analyzing How Social Affects Customer Service

One measurable benefit of social is customer satisfaction. It is now expected that enterprise businesses employ social media to share promotions and garner feedback from their respective customer bases. Companies tout their average first response times and customer satisfaction ratings with pride. This is one part of the overall equation. The reality is that these efforts often do not lead to widespread change because the communication is only between the customer and a social media customer service team. It is essentially the same idea as calling a customer service department, except using different technology.

To provide maximum benefits, you can integrate your internal and external social networks to not only provide value to your customers and reduce costs, but also facilitate knowledge transfer to solve issues more productively. A recent example of this comes from Nationwide Insurance. A call center agent received a call from a customer whose RV broke down and wanted to know if their policy covered the event. That agent did not know the answer, so he posted the customer’s question on his Yammer network, received an answer and was able to resolve the customer’s issue.

Real Life Examples of Social in Action

When an organization is looking to bring a new product to the market, it must do their due diligence to ensure its success. Success relies on multiple factors, including:

Strong leadership and vision provided by product owners

Conducting extensive market analysis and research to gauge interest, find a receptive audience, evaluate the competition and ensure market penetration

Extensive development, quality assurance and prototyping to go to market with a functional product

Companies can also leverage social to bring their customer base into the product design process. Dell’s IdeaStorm website has generated more than 17,000 ideas for new products and has spurred adoption of 500 of them. The company also creates StormSessions to post its initial ideas for products. It then encourages its customers to propose refinements, design tips and requirements.

Think of these sessions as pseudo-hackathons with customers driving innovation forward. Dell says that these sessions create more detailed feedback than traditional focus groups, and helps to create links to an important group of customers.

Add the Water Cooler into Your Product Design and Marketing Efforts

Every company has the proverbial water cooler — a place where its employees converge to talk about current events, where they are going after work or ideas that could “change and revolutionize the business.” Often these conversations are just hot air, but sometimes they could be ideas that can create positive change. One of the reasons why these conversations happen where they do is because employees may not feel comfortable or empowered enough to share their ideas with their bosses, product managers or executives.

The Future of SEO is Not SEOview commentsSearch engine optimization, as all traditional definitions describe it, is going to become obsolete. And the change has already begun.The Internet has always been a landgrab. It started with domain...

One of the biggest topics to emerge from the Microsoft conference circuit this year is the concept of “working like a network” -- encouraging companies to rethink how they operate, collaborate and communicate by using enterprise social technologies to eliminate departmental silos. This allows companies to better adapt and respond to ever-shifting market conditions as well as improve knowledge sharing.

To get a good understanding of what that vision looks like, watch Yammer’s Moments video. It shows how people within a responsive organization used Yammer to collaborate and create a product that made a difference for its customers. The video ends in a new product design job for an administrative coordinator, happy customers who fulfilled their goals, and a warm feeling about the power of enterprise social. This isn’t just marketing hype either: McKinsey & Company recently conducted a survey of leading enterprise companies on the use of social networks, and nearly 90 percent reported a measurable business benefit gained from implementing social platforms.

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The Future of SEO is Not SEOview commentsSearch engine optimization, as all traditional definitions describe it, is going to become obsolete. And the change has already begun.The Internet has always been a landgrab. It started with domain...